Envivio secures new financing, strengthens management team

IP video compression specialist Envivio has secured US$15m (€11.5m) in a mezzanine investment from venture capital and banking sources and has hired new finance and operations chiefs to cement its expansion.

The company has hired technology company veteran Erik Miller as chief finance officer and Kevin O’Keefe as chief operating officer, while chairman Gianluca Rattazzi has taken on an increased role as executive chairman.

Julien Signès, co-founder and president and CEO of Envivio, said that the company had sought the additional finance to strengthen its balance sheet in order to better place it to get involved in large-scale projects with top-tier operators, particularly in the North American market, which he said was beginning to see rapid growth in converged video deployments spanning mobile, online and IPTV. “We want to be strongly financed to address those large projects,” he said. Signès said that the US had accounted for about 20% of Envivio’s revenue historically but that this was likely to increase to about a third in the near term. He said the company was nevertheless continuing to see strong growth in Europe and especially in the Middle East.

Signès said that Envivio, which has historically been strong in the mobile video space, has increasingly been picking up business from hybrid broadcast and over-the-top service providers looking to develop converged fixed and mobile offerings. He said that the company had also picked up a number of green-field IPTV deployments and also IPTV-over-cable deployments, particularly in Asia where operators were leveraging DOCSIS 3.0 rollouts to leapfrog RF-based technologies, either for HDTV rollouts or, in the case of some operators, for their entire digital TV deployments.

Signès said that Envivio was increasingly going head-to-head for contracts with rivals including Harmonic, Ericsson, Motorola and Cisco and that over the next few months it would look to expand its product offering further. “We will expand our product lines by ourselves or we could expand our portfolio outside the company through mergers or acquisitions,” he said.